The Furutaka, a T5 Cruiser It was only fair that Suzuki Senchou was offered command of the Imperial Japanese Navy cruiser Furutaka on her addition to my fleet. It was his stellar record on the Kuma that not only drove the research of the new line of cruisers, but also drove improvements on other ships of the line. However, the deeper waters of Tier V engagements may tarnish the record that has brought my record of wins and losses almost to “average”. ...
Not harvesting. I figured out that I should do harvesting and/or crafting for awhile in FFXI, gain some levels. My armor craft is 52 or so, and my mining 51, but none of my other Disciple of Land/Hand jobs is anywhere near high enough to do me any good in Heavensward. Gathering is the exact sort of brainless, mechanical sort of thing I could do while watching Hulu. Having been informed that hard mode dungeons now gave experience, I almost took the plunge… but… there’s a new event going on! The Maiden’s Rhapsody. A mysterious traveler from a distant world has come to Eorzea to rediscover her mission, and her memories. ...
Chair goes boom. Kasul and I haven’t managed to be conscious and online at the same time FFXIV wants to be working for awhile. I’ve been spending time doing solo accomplishments. I’ve gotten paladin, warrior, dragoon, ninja, monk and dark knight to 50. That got me the “Warmonger” title. (Dark Knight wasn’t required for that, but I liked it so much). I don’t think I’ve done a dungeon since. Back in some festival or other, I saw a lot of people floating around in bomb chairs. I didn’t think much of it, but I started thinking I would really like to have one of those. The wiki said you could buy it when you had max rep with the kobolds, garnered by doing the daily kobold beast tribe quests. Those took me a few weeks, but I maxed rep and got the bomb chair, just tonight. ...
Kasul and I are going through our list of hard mode dungeons and clearing them out before continuing with the Heavensward storyline. There hasn’t really been a reason to do these dungeons before now. Since the launch of the expansion, superior gear is easy to come by, so the dungeon won’t offer any upgrades. And, I found out, once you’re post level 50, you don’t even get any experience. So, no experience and no upgrades means very little incentive to queue up for a dungeon. ...
Steps of Faith took a couple of tries I’ve been somewhat snarky in this blog and especially in the game about some of the folks we’ve encountered. The reluctance of the Crystal Braves to do pretty much anything. The motives of most of the NPCs. I’d been saying for weeks that the Crystal Brave Lalafell Yuyuhase was suspicious. He so very much was. I’d been saying for WEEKS that Wonder Twin Alphinaud was being handed titles and commendations for no reason. Alphinaud was being fed pablum to keep him docile and away from the truth. The very first time I saw the Sultana’s handmaiden, I said she was a spy. She was – a spy, and an assassin. ...
Sinestro needs Hal Jordan's LUUURVE Team Spode kinda left GW2 and kinda went back to DC Universe Online over the past couple weeks. Apathy toward the upcoming GW2 expansion may have contributed. Many of the top Spodians had already finished all of the story and had grinded through the long process to make their marginally better endgame gear. Personally, I liked my Asura engineer fine. I didn’t find the group content very compelling, and upgrades had long stopped dropping for me, so the gear progression I enjoy stopped happening. The story chapters felt tedious. Most importantly, my role in a party seemed ill-defined. I much prefer games where I know what’s expected of me. Many people enjoy the sort of wild mixture of roles in GW2. I liked choosing my turrets for the night and focusing on placement and all that – playing my own mini-game while everyone else played theirs. I wasn’t sure I ever actually contributed, though. ...
My first quest! Hey! First quest written in the “DM Mode” of Sword Coast Legends! It took some time to figure out the process. I imagine there are lots of videos showing precisely how to go about it. I’ll watch them, eventually, but I wanted to approach it as someone entirely new to the tools, as I am. My goal was to make a quest. The quest giver would be a traditional vampire. He would send the adventurers into a tomb of other vampires in order to obtain the “sparkle” that lets him walk about in the daylight, feed on mortal humans more easily, and so on. You know, “Twilight”. ...
Terror on the High Seas, me I’ve always sucked at team based PvP. Whether in fantasy MMOs or whatever, team PvP requires an instinct toward knowing your abilities, the abilities of your team, of your enemy, and the map, all at once. This is why I’ve not been able to get into MOBA games like League of Legends and such. I don’t like being terrible at stuff. Worse, I hate for people to know that I am terrible at stuff. Hence why I spent so long in MMOs playing support classes. The kind of people you bring to fill out the team. Druid and rogue in EQ, bard in EQ2 and Rift, priest and rogue in WoW. Priest in WoW might sound high pressure, but it was really just looking at a grid with everyone’s names on it and pressing the red buttons. I think that was before they nerfed WoW plugins. Back when I played, being a priest was just staying out of the fire and pressing red buttons. ...
Light take all Ascians! Last week left us with two plotlines vying for our time; the aftermath of Iceheart’s transformation into the primal Saint Shiva, and the continued incursions of the mysterious Ascians into mortal affairs. Iceheart’s transformation was sparked by the war cry of an elder dragon. She hoped to deflect the coming war by renewing the original Saint Shiva’s pact with dragonkind – a pact that the Ishagardians, prompted by the Ascians, has been shredding. We defeated Iceheart/Shiva and ruined her plans… but at a high cost. The cries of the Dravanian Horde had awoken a powerful entity thought dead since the Calamity had rained down upon the land. And no Saint Shiva could lull it back to slumber. ...
Shiva Awakens We knew we were going to meet Saint Shiva tonight, but we weren’t sure how. And it turned out to be a little different from what we expected. But naturally, we couldn’t get right there. First, we had to deal with that most enticing of all MMO situations – politics. The leaders of the three allied Eorzean nations met in Ul’dah to discuss the uncomfortable revelations about the traitors in their midst. The Garlean Empire had been content to just fortify their existing strongholds in Eorzea until recently. Even after the destruction of their Ultima weapon, they seem eager to take on the combined Eorzean forces, and even the new Crystal Braves grand company is not slowing them down. ...